It is not, I think, a coincidence, that much of the foundational work on what academics refer to as “the rhetorical presidency,” was written during the years of the Reagan administration. The original essay on the Rhetorical Presidency, published in 1981 in Presidential Studies Quarterly by James Ceaser, Joseph Bessette, and Jeffery Tulis, presents an institutional argument about the relative merits of deliberative, policy based public speech and a presidency that is run on the basis of what we now call the “permanent campaign” and a sort of pandering to public opinion. It reflects, among other things, the deep ambivalence in this country about political representation—should it be “responsible” or should it be based in the preferences of the mass public? It says a lot, of course, that we so often seen such a deep divide between these two things.

In many ways, however, Ronald Reagan did not see this divide as immeasurably large. Like FDR, he both took words seriously and believed in their educative power. Also like FDR, he worked hard on his own speeches, and spent considerable time making sure that he was saying what he meant to say in the way that he meant to say it. He was, of course, perfectly capable of ad libbing, and some of his rhetoric—like the claim while he was governor of California about the connection between trees and air pollution were, well, puzzling. But while president, he took language seriously, and treated his use of it as an important aspect of governance.

There is evidence too, that he considered language to have both instrumental and constitutive power—that is, he took language to be both useful in direct ways and in more indirect ways, ways that revealed and created a certain sort of political community. His speech at Normandy (see below), for instance, valorizing “the boys of Pont du Hoc,” both memorialized actions of specific bravery and located that bravery in the very bones of what it meant to be American. Reagan’s speech tended to unite these kinds of appeals—he would argue that because we were a certain kind of people, we would engage in certain kinds of political and policy action.

Recent events in Arizona and the ensuing debates about the power of rhetoric as well as the commemorations surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, serve, in very different ways, to remind us that of we are certain kinds of people, we will do certain kinds of things, and that political debates are fundamentally about who we are as much as they are about what we will do. Reagan understood that, and almost never lost sight of it. That is, I think, one of the reasons for the enduring power of his legacy.